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Coming Full Circle With a Grand Gesture

L’Africaine: Eve Queler conducting her final performance as music director for the Opera Orchestra of New York in this Giacomo Meyerbeer work, at Avery Fisher Hall.Credit
Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times

Big institutions like the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic anchor New York’s cultural life. But what makes the city a city — a scene, a place where music lives — is what groups like Eve Queler’s Opera Orchestra of New York provide: texture, variety, depth. Ms. Queler’s is the kind of company that makes the difference between a place you’d want to visit and a place you’d want to live.

Since 1971 Ms. Queler and the orchestra have presented more than a hundred operas in concert, delving into the corners of the repertory and featuring a potent mixture of established stars and up-and-comers, artists like Olga Borodina, José Carreras, Dmitri Hvorostovsky and Aprile Millo.

There have been classic nights: Plácido Domingo and Raina Kabaivanska in a 1973 “Francesca da Rimini”; a series of Czech operas in the ’80s with Gabriela Benackova; Grace Bumbry and Renée Fleming in Massenet’s “Hérodiade” in 1994. In 1972, when the Met was still plopping Renata Scotto into endless runs of “Lucia di Lammermoor,” “La Sonnambula” and “L’Elisir d’Amore,” Ms. Queler saw her potential range and power and put her in the Verdi rarity “I Lombardi,” a characteristically bold casting coup.

In the first Opera Orchestra season Ms. Queler did “L’Africaine,” Giacomo Meyerbeer’s luridly beautiful colonialist love-triangle story featuring the explorer Vasco da Gama, who was played then by the legendary tenor Richard Tucker. A blazing success, that production put the young troupe on the map.

Forty years later, on Wednesday evening at Avery Fisher Hall, Ms. Queler brought things full circle, giving her final performance as the company’s music director (Alberto Veronesi takes over next season) and capping a sometimes unsung but truly important career with a deliriously entertaining “Africaine.”

That epic opera was an influential hit when it had its premiere in Paris in 1865, but is now known largely for the tenor showpiece “O paradis.” The enormous Paris production featured the first completely revolving stage set and a fantastically realistic shipwreck. It is, of all operas, seemingly the worst suited to a concert performance.

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But as Ms. Queler’s company has always shown, opera — even grand opera — is never really about the décor, at least not when you have her taste for excellent, fiercely committed singers. The veteran tenor Marcello Giordani sang da Gama with burnished tone, power and ringing high notes. The soprano Ellie Dehn was passionately lyrical as his lover, Inèz.

Making her American debut as Inèz’s Indian rival, the soprano Chiara Taigi blithely ignored concert constraints, smoldering as she stalked the stage. Her big, dusky voice sometimes grew unsteady, but she was riveting, moving, fun and a little demented: in other words, just what opera is supposed to be.

The rest of the cast, particularly the baritone Fikile Mvinjelwa and the bass-baritone Daniel Mobbs, sang with style and energy. The orchestra was scrappy and true, and at times, as in the prelude to the opera’s final scene, deeply eloquent.

In that final scene Ms. Taigi’s character (wearing her third gown of the evening) kills herself by inhaling the vapor of a poisonous tree, dying to Meyerbeer’s eerily transcendent waltz music. As always, no scenery was necessary for Ms. Queler and her invaluable company to show you precisely where you were — in a little-known but utterly mesmerizing work of art — and to convince you that that was exactly where you wanted to be.

A version of this review appears in print on March 4, 2011, on Page C3 of the New York edition with the headline: Coming Full Circle With a Grand Gesture. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe